Six months of the Fitbit (and the new Fitbit Aria)

The backstory

I’m a fit and healthy person. Probably not your typical work-from-home desk-based screen-faced designer. I go to the gym 4 to 6 times a week, walk my dog every day, I eat fairly healthily and I’m a good weight.

I wasn’t always though. I’m not pretending I was massively fat, but after leaving university three years ago, I’d got some really bad habits (two cans of Relentless a day, anyone?!) and, whilst I’d been chubby since I was about 11 years old, I was actually pretty overweight. Being subject to the predictable insecurities of a 22 year old girl, I was incredibly insecure about my body, obviously I wanted to do something about it, but that doesn’t mean I went about it in the right way.

What followed was about a year and a half of dieting. It was horrible. I’m only 5’2, and without doing any exercise, I cut myself down to a miserable 900 calories per day and lost around 2 stone (about 30lbs) in those 18 horrible months. That’s really slowly. I was a misery and obsessively counting calories, keeping a food diary, beating myself up whenever I had a bad day and ate chocolate or burgers. I can’t have been much fun to live with either. Whilst I understood more about the effects that food had on my body than ever before, it was psychologically damaging. I might have lost weight but I still felt awful.

Discovering a gym

Once I’d lost the weight, I wanted to help fix my aching back, which was caused by my sitting at a computer all day. (Chris Comben was telling me to do it for ages, I finally did.) Now I was slim, I finally had the confidence to wear loose-fitting clothes to the classes and exercise in front of other people. So I tried Pilates. And I loved it, I’m sure a huge part of this was the classes I went to and the incredibly encouraging trainers there.

So then I started going to the gym, and then tried spin classes, and then more and more classes until I was completely addicted. The adrenaline, the way I suddenly felt so much better about myself, all incredibly addictive.

Learning How to push myself

I had an epiphany in a spin class. I realised that just going along and doing what I was told wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I had to want to be there, and I had to really push myself. Without actually pushing my body, as someone who was already healthy-ish, I wasn’t going to make any difference whatsoever. And after that revelation, and over a year where my weight has stayed the same, but my body shape has improved massively, I am still loving the gym and finding it has an enormous effect on me psychologically more than anything else.

Working from home

It’s lonely freelancing from home. Especially when you live by yourself. Working out has a few more benefits, I get to see and speak to real human beings (rather than magical beings on Twitter) and I am forced to leave my desk by 6pm in order to be at the classes by 6.30pm most weekday evenings. I’m usually far too exhausted to work after the gym, which also results in me having lovely, proper sleep as my body is now physically exhausted rather than just mentally-frustrated from a day in front of the computer.

The Fitbit bit

The Fitbit is a small plastic pedometer that you wear on your person. I favour the waistband or pocket, as I tend to mostly wear trousers, though I have occasionally worn it on my underwear when wearing dresses or trying to stop it spoiling the line of my clothes (that’s a rather girly power-user tip right there.)

My Fitbit on my waistband

The amount of stuff it records is pretty cool. It will record your steps, distance travelled, floors climbed (with the help of an altimeter,) calories burned and activity score. The activity score is a rating of how active you’ve been throughout the day, which gives you a nice goal to aim towards if you don’t want to obsess over steps, floors or calories.

It is a thing of beauty. It has a seamless display which shows you your pedometer statistics in clear blue text, which you can cycle through using the single button. You can also hold the button down to start/stop recording an activity session which allows you to record periods of sleep or specific periods of activity (it records all activity by default, but activity records can be handy if you want to know how far you travelled when you walked to the shops or similar.)

Fitbit gives me encouraging messages and greetings too

The Fitbit syncs wirelessly to a small dock which works with OS software to sync its stats to the web app. The dock also acts as a charger, which you rarely have to use as the Fitbit seems to have weeks of battery life at a time and charges up to full battery within an hour or so.

Sleeping with the Fitbit

The sleep recording functionality is pretty cool. Usually you’d move a lot less during your sleep, so you need to wear your Fitbit around your wrist. I found the provided wristband a little bit uncomfortable, the band itself is soft but the velcro fastening is a little bit abrasive round the edges. I made my own Fitbit wristband out of a tennis sweatband. I cut a hole in the sweatband, and stitched a Fitbit shape into it to stop it from getting stuck inside the band. This is much more comfortable and works just as well as the admittedly-slightly-slicker provided wristband.

Fitbit wristband (left) and my homemade wristband (right)

You start the sleep function by holding down the button. The Fitbit is smart enough to know that you’re sleeping by the amount of movement you’re (not) making.

The Fitbit web app

Now by itself, you could argue that the Fitbit is just a rather fancy, slightly expensive sleep-recording pedometer. Really, it’s the addition of the web app that makes it so incredibly valuable.

The Fitbit dashboard

Sleep log

Starting with the sleep log, the Fitbit will tell you how long you slept for, how often you woke up and use that to judge your quality of sleep. This is pretty handy if you want to improve your sleep quality, especially as you can see your sleep history, comparing each night.

one night’s sleep with the Fitbit

My sleep history

Activity Log

This is my favourite part. There is no better way to motivate yourself than seeing how much exercise you’ve been doing in statistic form. And if you’re competitive? You can also share your information with friends (this allows you to lock down or make public as much or as little info as you’d like) to compete and motivate yourself to beat the other people in your group with daily, weekly or lifetime scores.

Friends’ leaderboard

And, as with all good apps, you can earn badges for your achievements (I love badges!) I’m doing fairly well with mine. It’s actually really lovely when you get a little notification email telling you you’ve earned a new badge. The achievements seem to be infrequent enough that they actually feel meaningful (you don’t get a badge for just anything) but not so rare that they feel like hard work.

My Fitbit badges

I’d say that the Fitbit is really best if you’re a walker or a runner, as it really is just a pedometer. You can easily record other types of exercise through their Activity Log but these are just basing a lot of the values on averages, rather than the actual calories you are likely to have burnt, actual steps taken etc. This doesn’t mean that the Fitbit is useless though. The majority of exercise I do (asides from walking) isn’t something that the Fitbit records itself, activities like biking or lifting weights. It will pick up that you’re doing some kind of activity, but won’t necessarily reflect the intensity. I actually find this just pushes me harder to do more exercise that the Fitbit does record.

a graph of my calories burnt so far today

Food Log

I truly believe that the best way to lose weight is to keep a food and drink diary. It really makes you realise what you’re putting into your body. The Fitbit food log helps with this as you can quickly enter in your foods from its extensive database, in whatever quantities suit you best. Like other food databases, it tends to mostly feature food from the US, but you can easily add new foods yourself, and they’ve got a much better database of raw ingredients (fruit, veg etc.) than any other web app I’ve used.

Fitbit food log

My main criticism of the Fitbit web app is the focus on calories in the food log. Their food plans allow you to set reasonable goals based around calorie consumption, but this isn’t necessarily the healthiest way to lose weight. Whilst you do get an indication of how much Fat, Carbs and Protein you’re consuming, the emphasis is still on losing calories when an emphasis on less fat and carbs would probably be more beneficial to people looking for a healthy diet. Apps like Daily Burn do this better.

Fitbit food goals

Weight Log

The weight log is handy and has become even more so since I got the Fitbit Aria scales two weeks ago (prior to that you had to enter your weight and body fat statistics directly into the app yourself.) These beautiful scales look lovely in the bathroom and sync wirelessly to the Fitbit web app via WiFi. This means there’s no tricking the scales by rounding up or down when you enter your values into the app, it’s all completely automatic, and that really adds to the motivation to lose weight!

Fitbit Aria scales

You can also manually input your body measurements, which is great because it helps defeat that myth that appearance and body shape is all about weight, and you’re presented with some lovely graphs and charts of your body data to help you see how you’re doing and where you want to be.

My weight as recorded by the Aria scales

A lovely lean vs fat graph

Other logs

There’s also a whole host of other logs that you can use to keep an eye on your body. In case you couldn’t tell by now, I’m loving these stats. Nothing makes me feel quite so much like a future person than looking at graphs about my own body. I feel like an android (the cool robot, not the rubbish phone.)

I make use of the Mood log a fair bit. I think it’s healthy to assess your mood from time to time, understand yourself better and try to get to the root of what’s making you feel happy or sad.

Mood history

Custom trackers

I’ve also made use of the one custom tracker you’re allowed on the free plan (unlimited on Premium) to record how many fruits and vegetables I eat in a day. This is a great motivation for me to eat more!

my custom fruit and veg tracker

Email Motivations

A lovely little addition to the Fitbit web app is the weekly stats you get sent via email. A nice little reminder of how you’re doing compared to last week, and a kick up the bum if you’ve been lazy.

Weekly stats email

Extensibility

Fitbit seems to work with about a million different web apps, which is great if you want it to work with something else you use, and also has its own API. Elliott Kember has made the genius FitBit Racing where a load of us have a weekly race to the most steps or floors (great for competitive people!) and I’m sure if you’re a smarter developer than me, you can make a lot of cool stuff with your data.

Overall

I love my Fitbit. I love it to the point where I actually go back for it if I leave it at home when I go out. I’ve got to the point where I wonder what’s the point of walking if I’ve not got my Fitbit on? Maybe that’s not healthy…but maybe it’s actually a sign of a gadget that has become so completely a part of my life that I’d really feel like I was missing out without it.

With the motivation my Fitbit provides, the confidence it’s given me in my ability to keep myself healthy and multiple ways to track myself that goes so far beyond miserably standing on the scales and counting calories, I really couldn’t recommend it more.

And if you do get one, be my friend! I share all my data with my friends by default (there’s no obligation to do that though!) it keeps me in check…

Lee

I love my Fitbit too – I’ve always struggled with my weight but the simple combination of motivation, accountibility and a dash of competitiveness has help me get my 70lbs weightloss badge today, still a way to go but it’s so easy!

Ian

Carl

Excellent post and responses everyone. I use both the fitbit ultra and aria scale and they are awesome! I also have myfitnesspal linked to my fitbit to track my meals and calories and I use endomondo to track my exercise (runs). I love all this technology!

Courtney C.

This is a great review! I liked how detailed it was and I also didn’t know about the one free custom report, which I’m going to have to use. I found your site after Googling the fitbit.

I’ve had mine over a year after my company bought them for us. I didn’t really actually get motivated with mine until this summer though. I’ve already lost 9 lbs with it, which is amazing. I was the laziest person ever before and when I first started using it, I would average 3-5,000 steps. Now I compete with myself everyday to see how well I can do. I just recently earned the 30,000 step badge the other day and I was so proud! I feel like they should pay me to be their spokesperson :)

Thanks Laura, nice review. Been using the Flex and Aria for a month now. Two weeks in I stopped logging food, as (a) it was driving me mental and (b) I’d switched to a slow carb diet, which is always around 1200 calories a day anyway.

Used the extra tracker to count kettlebell swings, so now the focus is on steps, swings and weight.

The morning weigh-in is hugely motivational as I’m usually down 2-300g a day.

The only annoyance for me is that the extra tracker does not show up on the dashboard or iPhone app. Otherwise, one happy chappy.

Quick update .. Aria ‘crashed’ this morning. Would not even show my weight. Apparently this is fairly common as I found a blog with hundreds of posts with the same issue. No phone support, it’s all (very slow) email support. Would not recommend the Aria based on this, seems they still need to get the kinks out of it. Flex still fine tho.

Jacqui

Great review! Have now bought an ultra and, after initial hitches in setting up an account – it is great and I LOVE IT!! Have had weight issues for a long time now, and I think that this may be a really useful tool in getting me to up my exercise…….

Amy

Jenner

Just letting you know that the bodyfat measurements and even the weights recorded with the Aria scale are most likely completely inaccurate. Fitbit send estimated numbers to your app due to how inaccurate the actual scale device is.

Keyna Nuoffer

Tara

I spin every day and in addition to steps and sleep I would like my fitbit force to be able to track calories burned during class. I’ve read that since it only tracks “steps” it’s won’t accurately calculate that type of activity. Any suggestions? I bought one for me and my husband and haven’t opened mine (he has) until I can figure this out. Thanks!

Jackie

Hi Tara I have the Fitbit one which I love, but like you I spin and do Pilates I have found an app that will sync with the Fitbit app and record your spin class, Pilates and much more.
The name of the app is digifit
And it syncs perfectly.
I hope this helped
Stay healthy and fit

Bruno

I really liked your article, it’s really complete. I like you tips to monitor veggies and fruit, it’s a good one… It remember me the health challenge we have here in montreal and quebec (http://www.healthchallenge.ca/en/home).

I just got one around a month and a half ago. Love your review! It totally changed my life, I also am lost if I get to work without it. Dang all those steps not getting recorded!!!! It has really inspired me to do more. I’m going to try some of the features that you covered, I had not been using all of them.
Thanks, great review
Vicki

Great review! I play tennis and wanted to know if you think it would track all the movement on the court better than anything else out there. I’m more interested in analyzing the performance during the sport more than for overall activity/health tracking.

Larry Cerny

Clarissa

This review is so spot on. When I first got my nike+ band I ran 4-7 miles a day (on top of high school activities, man I miss that energy…)

But…mi went to college… Got kind of lazy… My nike+ band died…. And then I got pregnant… And running was nearly impossible. I had gone right back to square one where it was unpleasant, difficult, and I wasn’t able to motivate myself.

Until I got the Fitbit surge, which I’ve become obsessed with. The food diary function is awesome. I’ve never actually done that, but lately I’ve become aware that I don’t process sugar well. The problem is… I LOVE mini Reese’s. But after keeping my surge on for even a few days I was no longer motivated to eat them, because I hate adding high calorie snack binges, it’s just disappointing to watch all your work go down the drain, and when you see it on a screen it’s more difficult to deny than just knowing you’re consuming a meals worth of chocolate.

I also love that the app encourages you to drink water, because I need that reminder typically!